1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of virtual machines, and more particularly to a virtual machine allocation at physical resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
Virtual machines help to more efficiently use physical processing resources by allowing one computer system to support functions normally performed by multiple separate computer systems. A virtual machine is an operating system executing over a physical processing resource, typically a server, to appear as its own physical resource. By virtualizing a server environment in a cloud-based network, a single physical resource can support multiple virtual machines in a flexible manner that provides improved utilization of the processing resource. Further, if a physical processing resource in a cloud-based network becomes over-utilized, virtual machines can migrate to other physical processing resources of the cloud-based network that have processing capacity.
Virtual machines are typically hosted across an arbitrary set of physical hardware, such as server computers that include load balancing of processing resources to improve scalability and infrastructure stability. Conventional load balancing techniques focus on processor and memory usage at each physical hardware resource to spread processing and memory usage evenly across all available physical hardware resources. Although conventional load balancing helps to avoid some physical hardware resources becoming overwhelmed while other physical hardware resources are underutilized, in some instances this may increase power consumption. For example, conventional load balancing can result in all physical hardware resources running at underutilized rates, so that a relatively high overhead of power consumption provides a relatively small workload production.